Gadgetory

I'm Dan Ackerman and we are here taking a look at the Alienware 18 a very unusual computer indeed in that it's a big 18 inch desktop replacement gaming system and even most of the gaming laptops that we've seen this year have actually been this new breed of smaller 13 inch and 14 inch gaming systems maybe the kind that you're gonna plug into an external monitor and only use the built-in screen when you're traveling or where you don't want to bother with that this guy gigantic 18 inch 1920 by 1080 screen this is primarily the display you're gonna use I can't imagine this dragging this over to a TV and plugging it into you know and even larger screen even though it does have HDMI and may display four it outputs pretty much everything you need is built into here it's gonna take up your entire desk the thing is gigantic and it weighs more than 12 pounds just like this if you add in the gigantic AC adapter then it's more than 15 pounds now Alienware did sort of stack the deck a little bit when they sent us this configuration it's super high-end it's it's got a top of the line into a core i7 it has got a 512 gig SSD and a regular hard drive on top of that it's got two nvidia geforce 780 graphics cards and it's got a whopping 32 gigabytes of RAM I don't think I've ever actually gotten that in a laptop to review before you put all that together and it's more than four thousand dollars for this particular very very very high-end configuration although the base model starts at about 2100 but of that level you're not really buying a super gaming machine which i think is really what you want from this guy now we've got all the typical Alienware bells and whistles you know the light-up touchpad all the different lighting zones here and there and the build quality and the construction you know it's it's excellent because Aling where as part of dell and they can afford to design and build these big gaming chasings whereas if you get a gaming laptop from a boutique pc maker it's generally off the shelf body that they buy that's maybe not specially made for gaming and they just cram all this high-end stuff into it so that's the real advantage here you have this big kind of matte black slab maybe a little bit like the obelisk in 2001 just sort of lands on your desk takes up the entire thing if you're going to spend that much you certainly want to trick this out all the way up to the top and we can play just about any current PC game cranked all the way up to the top levels I was playing battlefield for an ultra mode and it worked just fine but keep in mind this is not something that's even remotely portable it fits the definition of laptop only in the broadest sense of the word I'm Dan Ackerman and that is the Alienware 18